It’s always great to see a local band get some attention at a national outlet, especially when it’s an outlet on the level of the AV Club, which premiered The Young’s new video for “Cry of Tin” today. If you haven’t heard it yet, “Cry of Tin” is slight step away from the more classic rock oriented sounds of the band’s Matador Records debut Dub Egg, featuring a motorik rhythm and forboding guitars screeching out noisy, delay-drenched riffs. The video itself is a riff on the standard broke band practice of taking over a storage unit and making it a DIY practice space, but since these are especially bleak economic times, the band is surrounded by lawyers, massage therapists and other professionals who agree commercial real estate rent is too damn high. But then some amoral locksmiths get involved and everything goes to hell. Go see for yourself.

We wrote about it yesterday for our The Latest Toughs round-up of new tracks, but now Kathryn Legendre’s “Have You Forgotten Me?” is available to purchase through Bandcamp. As we said in that column, the track is “a beautiful slice of classic country, with Legendre’s aching voice packing an emotional wallop as she contemplates on lost love and the difficulties of forgetting,” so give it a listen and maybe send Legendre a purchase or two.

Perennial do-gooders Austin Music People announced the venues that will be taking part in their second annual United We Jam fundraiser festival, and it’s a murderers’ row of awesome Austin venues.

The 2014 participating venues to date include:

Beerland

The Blackheart

Cheer Up Charlie’s

Empire Control Room & Garage

Holy Mountain

Hotel Vegas

Mohawk

The Scoot Inn

Side Bar

Spider House Ballroom

The Volstead

The White Horse

United We Jam takes place August 29th and 30th, with each night kicking off at 8 pm and going until closing time. Every venue that participates will charge no more than $5 for cover, and AMP Executive Director Jennifer Houlihan says “There are no VIP lines and no street closures for this event,” which already puts it ahead of every other Austin festival. The venues will also be curating their own talent, and we’ll keep you posted on the line-ups as they come in but in the meantime keep an eye on AMP’s site. We expect this to be a must-see festival not just for the local talent it will showcase, but for the worthiness of its cause.

Austin Music People, one of Austin’s best and most active music activism organizations, has started a letter writing campaign to get better funding for the Austin Music Office. As AMP points out, music brings in nearly $2 billion in revenue for the city of Austin and is of course built into the city’s very identity as the “Live Music Capital of the World,” yet the Austin Music Office only receives $47,000 a year in funding. As AMP Executive Director Jennifer Houlihan said on Facebook, that’s a little more than a fifth of what the city spends on the Zilker Park golf course each year and that’s unacceptable. AMP has made it extremely easy to voice your opinion on this matter with an easy to use automatic letter generator and we highly recommend you add your voice to the campaign.

BLXPLTN premiered their new track “Star Fires” exclusively on Vice’s Noisey blog earlier this week, but in case you missed it, BLXPLTN have made the track freely streamable on Soundcloud now. The original working title of the track was “Lion,” and everyone who has caught the band live knows how infectious its “You’re a tiger/And I’m a lion” chorus is but it’s nice to get a clear recording that allows more of Jonathan Horstmann’s voice to come out, right from that brilliant “Calling all casualties” opening. BLXPLTN’s small army of producers have wisely left these tracks more or less untouched from their live iterations, from the frantic guitar playing of Khattie Q to Horstmann’s ravey synth lines and TasZ’s muscular drumming. It’s easy to point out how aggro BLXPLTN tracks are, but much of the real appeal of the band is in their unique mixture of spicy and sweet elements, which is on full display here. Don’t forget BLXPLTN could use some help with their fundraising efforts right now, too.

Over at the Chronicle, Chase Hoffberger digs into the parking crisis that continues to impact Austin’s downtown music scene and the way the situation has gotten bad enough that many venue owners are departing the area altogether. Hoffberger mentions venues like Radio as “destination” spots that are bypassing the “cool factor” problem by offering more convenient afterwork travel, and as we pointed out in a piece on Austin’s folk scene earlier this month, Radio is one of many venues that has seen that pay off in the growth of organic scenes. It’s a worthwhile read for anyone who has suffered downtown parking woes or who is curious about how Austin’s rampant growth continues to affect the scene.

Over at The Tapedeck, Austin hip-hop wunderkind Curbside Jones has some some great advice for acts e-mailing blogs trying to get coverage. If you’ve read our Amplified articles, you know we’re all about helping artists learn ways to get further in the industry, and Curbside is dead on with his suggestions, specifically his reminder that making a music writer’s job easier is “key to getting them to write about your stuff.”

Curbside Jones is playing Holy Mountain on August 11th with Dark Time Sunshine, and we’ve embedded his new EP Wakeup Super! below for you to check it out.

Laura Roberts wrote one of her trademark poetic profiles for us on Adam Ahrens, who is in the middle of a residency at Lambert’s. As well as being a great writer, Laura is also a fantastic photographer and we’ve got some more photos she took of Adam Ahrens and his band that didn’t make it into the piece.

We raved about Meenk a little while ago in our From Our Living Room to Yours column and she e-mailed us this week to share a video she made of her new song “Firefly.” On her Facebook page, Meenk describes “Firefly” as her “first love song,” but to our ears it’s more of an anti-love song, detailing some one way affection gone wrong. Without other instrumentation supporting Meenk’s voice and guitar work, “Firefly” is almost uncomfortably vulnerable, like an entry in the diary of a dead friend, your fingers turning the pages without consulting you first. Give it a listen and be sure to check out Meenk’s debut EP, too.

If you’re on this page, then that means you’ve stumbled across Ovrld’s new blog, Plus Ones. “Wait,” you ask, “I thought Ovrld was a blog? Why does a blog need a blog? What’s next, dogs on dogs?” These are perfectly acceptable questions. Except that dogs on dogs bit. Can’t help you there.

Plus Ones is meant as a platform for some of the stuff we get sent at Ovrld that just doesn’t fit on the main site for feature content. Sometimes that’s a brand new track from a beloved band, or a really great poster for a local show, or some interesting news one of our fellow publications have broken about Austin music. Or maybe it’s just something fun we want to share you without the pressure of turning it into a full length article. Plus Ones will also be a home for bonus content from other pieces, whether it’s more photos from our amazing stable of local photographers, audio outtakes from interviews, and maybe even video outtakes from projects we’re working on. We also want it to be way for us to include the community more, from photos fans have taken at local shows to commentary on how our weekends went or responses to issues that arise in Austin’s music scene. And because we’re committed to continuing to put Austin music first on Ovrld, Plus Ones offers a place for us to let you know about good national acts that are coming through without making our homepage an invasion of touring bands.

Hopefully you’ll like it, and as we continue to develop it we’ll be listening for your thoughts on what’s working and what isn’t. Thanks for reading our site and for all your support!